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Waymo's Driverless Cars Have Logged 10 Million Miles On Public Roads (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Alphabet's driverless-car company Waymo announced a new milestone today (Oct. 10): its vehicles have driven a collective 10 million miles on U.S. roads. With cars in six states, Waymo has really been racking up the miles since April 2017, when it launched a program giving rides to passengers around the Phoenix, Arizona area. At that point, Waymo cars had driven not quite 3 million miles since the company's earliest days as a research project within Google in 2009. But in the last 18 months, the company more than tripled its road mileage.
Competing with other companies with autonomous-vehicle programs like Uber, Tesla, Apple, and GM's Cruise, Waymo is leading the pack in terms of road miles driven. [...] The company's next 10 million miles, CEO John Krafcik said in today's announcement, will focus on "striking the balance" between its safety-first algorithms and driving assertively in everyday maneuvers, like merging, and navigating bad weather. But it's worth keeping things in perspective: U.S. drivers rack up some 3 trillion miles each year, so Waymo still has some ground to cover.
Competing with other companies with autonomous-vehicle programs like Uber, Tesla, Apple, and GM's Cruise, Waymo is leading the pack in terms of road miles driven. [...] The company's next 10 million miles, CEO John Krafcik said in today's announcement, will focus on "striking the balance" between its safety-first algorithms and driving assertively in everyday maneuvers, like merging, and navigating bad weather. But it's worth keeping things in perspective: U.S. drivers rack up some 3 trillion miles each year, so Waymo still has some ground to cover.
Uber's self driving car has already killed a person quite deliberately because the software contained a major bug.
Now, the question is: are we ready to trust the driving software knowing that it's nigh impossible to program in all the possible choices and situations? Say, a self driving car is driving a free way at 55MPH and suddenly encounters a group of people, a stalled car and a cliff, and there's no time to apply the brake properly. Where will it go? What the decision will be? You can think of hundreds of such scenarios where there are no easy answers at all.